Doing Right by Consumers

Back in 2003, TalkTalk started to change the telecoms industry, simply by making broadband affordable.

But then they started to act like all other telecoms companies,
they got carried away with complex pricing structures and shiny deals with hidden catches.

This 39 seconds video summarises the company I walked into.

Meet Kat, Robyn, Jen & Al
Let’s take a minute to meet the people we were designing for. TalkTalk as a value company attracts a wide spectrum of customers. From budget conscious students to families with lots of devices connected all at once.
“I need to save money but I’m not sure how.
I am internet savvy but new to paying bills.”
Katalin | 20

University Student

“I need TalkTalk to work for all my family with out any surprises.”
Robyn | 42

IT Consultant

“There is too much going on, I don’t know what to listen to and what to ignore”
Jenna | 37

Part-time teacher assistant

“I need to know that TalkTalk is giving me the best value”
Allan | 68

Retired Clerk

TalkTalk didn’t have the best reputation for service experience. They knew their customers had a choice, they didn’t have to stay and with new regulations, they didn’t even have to talk to TalkTalk if they wanted to leave.

TalkTalk knew they had to do better by their customers if they wanted to see lower churn.

Consumer Revolution

The consumer revolution was born out of the realisation that the company needed a way to make it simpler for customers to engage with them. To achieve this vision, TalkTalk had to reduce complexity, deliver continuous and consistent customer service in every channel – while dramatically reducing costs.

Let’s take a look at how
I tackled this challenge
Happy Times!

My team realised that in order to make their products better it was essential to create a frictionless billing experience. The ultimate goal was that every interaction with the products were about happy moments instead of frustrated moments of confusion about the monetary transaction related to their products.

The numbers

TalkTalk received approximately 1 million contacts annually from customers enquiring about, or disputing charges on their recent bills. This contact was inconvenient to customers, and inefficient for TalkTalk, resulting in increased call centre costs, applied credits, discount offers and dissatisfaction which resulted in customer churn.

  • Customer receiving only online bills – 90%
  • Customers signed up to Direct Debit – 77%
  • Customers who churn due to billing related disputes – 17 %

Million Customers

Million Contacts Related to billing

Types of bills

Legacy Systems

The role of UX at TalkTalk

Designing
For the millions

As we grew our understanding of what it took to do right by our customers, we had to revolutionise the way design was done at TalkTalk.
One key aspect was to handhold our internal stakeholders to help them understand how a legal document (the bill) can also be user centric.

Design Workshops

We ran workshops to align early on while we gather requirements and also understood the legal aspects of the experience we were designing.

Information Architecture

With dozen of data points, it was key to understand how they all came together and what was essential for our customers to understand at different points of their journey.
Explore the IA

Storyboarding

Used to bring empathy into our design process and explore the right level of information at all different touch points and within the complexity of a billing cycles.
Robyn's Story

Principles

We planned to avoid billing related calls, through addressing call drivers and driving self service throughout the end to end customer billing journey.

These were the principles that guided TalkTalk’s bill redesigned.

Clarity

Charges are transparent, clearly explained and correctly applied to the customers account.

Capability

Customers can quickly get all of the charges detail on any of their devices.

Consistency

Every customer know what charges to expect and there won’t be any hidden charges.

Accuracy

All charges are always right

Research Timeline 🙂

 

Pre-Consumer Revolution

A year before this project took off, the team had looked into some blue sky thinking for when the time was right. Some of the topics that we explored were:

 

  • Next, Current and Previous bill
  • Bill Comparison
  • Progressive Disclosure
  • Quickview bill breakdown
  • Statement Visualisations
View Report

Competitive Analysis

Once the programmed officially kicked off, we analysed our competitors and other telcos around the world. We focused our analysis on the following themes :

 

  • At a glance | real-time
  • The structure
  • The detail
  • Feedback | support
  • Future bills | current charges
  • The bill history
View Analysis

Billing Vision

Tested early concepts to inform our design iterations. We were keen to get the following right early on:

 

  • Bill Layout
  • Effectiveness Communicating Charges and Debits
  • Emotional Elements
View Report

Design Validation

Now with a higher visual fidelity, we kept testing our design assumptions.
In this round of research we focused on:

 

  • Discoverability
  • Quick View Options
  • Bill Notifications
  • Online Chat
  • FAQs
View Analysis

Mobile Billing

Now that we had confidence on striking the right balance between content density and interaction design, we tested our mobile approach. Our main questions were around:

 

  • Visual hierarchy
  • Discounted Price Treatments
  • Discoverability (more complex tasks)
View Report

…

Prototypes

During the project we worked on three major design iterations, from interactive wireframes to high fidelity. Along the way we created numerous variants and thanks to rigorous usability testing we went from a very complex billing interface to this one.

Play
Research
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Research

The outcome

“We’ve seen a 40% reduction in our early life complaints, 15% reduction in early life calls, which is fantastic. We just reported our lowest ever churn, which is a real testament to how this is really starting to land and improve our customer experience.”
Alex Birtles

Head of Customer Loyalty Strategy, TalkTalk

“I just wanted to drop you a note with a quick update from TalkTalk.

The bill redesign rollout was very successful – following the plan with no postponements or rollbacks – which is testament to level of quality delivered by all involved. Crucially, there has been no adverse operational impact (i.e. to our call centres) compared to BAU levels, even though big changes like this often increase calls in the short term while customers get used to the new proposition. To give you some idea of scale, we’ve had approx. 500k unique page views to the latest bill page alone since beginning the rollout a fortnight ago.”

Jamie Parkins

Senior Online Product Manager, TalkTalk

Remember the purple dinosaur?

 

TalkTalk changed their whole business preposition to one that was more human, connected to the reality and challenges of their customers.

Their new mission was to deliver affordable, reliable, simple and fair services for everyone.

 

This 16 seconds video summarises the company I left behind.

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